The capital backing it would profit. Your scenario is a real doom loop of runaway capital building up without any corresponding returns to human labour.
See Thomas Picketty and his “Capital in the 21st Century”.
The US already has a legal concept of personhood for companies. We are soon going to lose control to these “people” and businesses overrunning the economy, the internet and our culture.
> Social media is an extremely competitive landscape, with competitors rising overnight.
This is not true at all. There are two players. FB/Instagram and TikTok. Using one does not preclude using the other. Other than tiktok, who was the last new player in social?
> Google, Apple and Microsoft dominate the world with their products and platforms. Facebook & WhatsApp certainly doesnt.
There are all kinds of social media, its segmented by userbase, and culture/geography.
Telegram has 1B users (which is surprising to me, I thought it was an ex-Soviet thing), and there are entire geographic strongholds, such as Russia and China.
Russia and China still use iPhones and Windows, but entirely skipped out on Facebook and Whatsapp.
> There are all kinds of social media, its segmented by userbase, and culture/geography.
Your own link has Meta with 3 of the top 4 platforms. Can you really see any of the competitors overtaking them in even the medium term?
> Russia and China still use iPhones and Windows, but entirely skipped out on Facebook and Whatsapp.
China doesn't use Google either, and while they might use Windows they're staying off Azure which is where Microsoft's main business is these days.
Yes there are countries which stay off Meta. But they are just as embedded in the workings of the world as any of the companies you mentioned, probably more so. Government decisions are made by people using a mix of Apple, Google and Microsoft hardware - but all of them are communicating over WhatsApp.
And for all the scorn it gets on HN, Facebook still works for some of my use cases: high school friends, low-contact relatives, obscure geography groups, the Philippines.
Yeah, you can't have kids walking in daylight during the winter solstice unless all schools start at the same time. You can pick a time zone to match the school start time, or you can pick a school start time to match the time zone. But any school more that 30 minutes different has kids walking in the dark during the winter solstice.
Civilian telecoms are absolutely used in military UAVs. Ukraine and Russia both use their opponents SIM cards in long range strike drones. And I’m pretty sure that attack vector would work well anywhere, including the US.
See Thomas Picketty and his “Capital in the 21st Century”.